Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB Solid State Drive Review

Testing – HDTune Pro
HDTune Pro is one of the most popular hard drive software suites available. It has many different benchmarks and tests built into it. Our first test is the read benchmark, which tests the average read speed and access time of the drive.

hdtune read

hdtune read graph

As you can see the SiliconEdge Blue did quite well against the other drives that are based off the SandForce controller.

Next up we have the write benchmark.

hdtune write

hdtune write graph

Now I was a little puzzled when I saw the results of this test.  Right about halfway through the test the drive dropped off.  I ran this test 5 times to see if it would happen every time and it did.

Since the release of HDTune 3.5 there has been a new Random Access test added to the software. This test measures the performance of random read and write operations. Tests are taken in 512b, 4KB, 64KB, 1MB, and random file sizes. The performance of the drive is reported in operations a second (IOPS), average access time and average speed. Here are both the results from the read and write random access tests.

hdtune io read

hdtune io write

The 4K read results were right around 5K, which is what we like to see, but the write results were quite low only around 2.5K.

Finally we have the 64MB file benchmark.

hdtune file

As you can see the read topped out at about 230MB/s and the write sort of dropped off towards the end of the test.

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